continuum

continuum turns whatever you hold into a stream faster than fingers.

Ligeti built Continuum and Coulee, for harpsichord and organ, from one figure repeated past the threshold where notes fuse into texture; this machine does the repeating for you. Your held keys become the machine’s material: while any keys are down, the machine cycles through them at rate notes per second, each note sounding for gate of its slot at the velocity you pressed that key with. order picks the path through the held set: "up" and "down" cycle by pitch, "played" follows the order of arrival, and "random" takes a seeded walk that never repeats a key back to back while more than one is held. The stream starts on the note-on that wakes the empty machine, retriggering a held key updates its velocity in place, and releasing the last key stops the cycle.

Note-ons and note-offs are consumed: the cycle replaces direct sounding, so your own keystrokes never reach the output, only the machine’s notes do. Everything else passes. The machine tracks up to 16 held keys; further keys are consumed but ignored until a slot frees up.

continuum is a generator: it runs on its own seeded clock and cleans up on a scene switch, and the seed only matters for order="random", the other orders being already deterministic.

The machine’s notes travel down the chain like anything else, which is the point of chaining: put velocity-curve or mode-lock after continuum and the whole stream is reshaped.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Range
rate	number	12.0	2..=30 notes per second
order	string	"played"	"up", "down", "played", "random"
gate	number	0.5	0.1..=0.9 fraction of each slot
seed	integer	0	any unsigned 64-bit value

Example

miditool.kdl

input "Roland"
output virtual="miditool Out"

continuum rate=15.0 order="played" gate=0.5 seed=3
velocity-curve gamma=0.7 ceiling=110

Hold a chord and it becomes the pattern: the held keys cycle at 15 notes a second in the order you pressed them, and the curve underneath lifts the blur so the stream stays present at speed. This is the continuum scene of examples/machines.kdl.

Try this

Shorten the gate and let the order wander:

continuum rate=24.0 order="random" gate=0.2 seed=11

At 24 notes a second with a fifth of each slot sounding, single keys turn into a dry ticking and chords into a shimmer whose internal order never settles. Swap seed= until the walk sings; the number you keep is the piece.